It happens to brewers, too, only in their case it’s usually the culture that’s lacking, not the science. When you look back over the last 50 years of beer in America, you see, time after time, beers that were born too soon. Some held on, surviving until their genius was vindicated. Some went under, leaving only memories and a few bottles on collectors’ shelves. These are the beers that were Brewed Too Soon.

Old School

Not every great beer that came before its time was born of a craft brewer’s fevered brain. Every generation forgets that their dried-up, despised parents were once young, and dreamed their own wild ideas. Now we build double IPAs and pack whole leaf hops into re-jiggered water filters to soak hops into the beer as it runs to the glass. But our fathers and our grandfathers built icons: Ballantine IPA and Ballantine Burton Ale, aged months or years in great wooden vats, and they built stills and distilled hops essence to spike them. You can dream really big dreams when you have the resources of a five million-barrel brewery behind you.

“The normal IPA would probably spend a year to two in storage,” I was told by John Brzezinski, the retired head of Ballantine’s Technical Department, the man in charge of formulation. “It was a magnificent product, if that was what you liked. It was stored in tanks 140-150 barrels in size, wooden tanks, lined with mammet [brewer’s pitch]. Before each batch was packaged, it went through taste tests, and Otto Badenhausen [one of the two brothers who owned Ballantine] would be on the panel. Those batches judged to have the best characteristics were set aside for further aging.” That further aging, in vats, not bottles, could be as much as 25 years.

“Once a year,” John continued, “the Ballantine Burton Ale was packaged from those batches. It was not packaged directly, but blended with IPA. IPA had a BU of 45-50, Burton Ale had something like 60-70 from the additional dry-hopping.”

If that sounds amazing, check this out. Ballantine Burton Ale was the ultimate in limited release beers: none of it was for sale. Every case was given away to people the brewery deemed worthy—executives, politicians, movie stars, athletes. Many of them had no idea what to do with a beer like this: President Eisenhower sent his two cases back to the brewery.

If a brewery made that beer today, and sold 1,200 cases for whatever the market would bear, they’d probably find themselves with a lot of money, and maybe a couple first-born children. Back then? A curiosity, a publicity stunt. Imagine: Dark Lord Day, and they’re giving the stuff away.

There were other beers from big breweries and regional breweries that came along in the 1970s and 1980s, right at the beginning of the craft beer revolution, beers that maybe could have made it twenty, ten, or even five years later, but never got a chance. Beers like Prior’s Double Dark, a nice, sweetish dark lager from the Christian Schmidt (earlier known as Adam Scheidt) Brewery of Norristown, PA (Prior’s is rumored to have been the inspiration for Saranac Black Forest Porter from Matt Brewing); or Schlitz’s Erlanger, the big brewery’s shot at a fuller-bodied lager. It was almost as if the craft revolution had given these brewers the courage to re-visit their roots, but it was too soon…and too late.

The book begins on the day of David Gottlieb Yuengling’s funeral in 1877. As the town of Pottsville prepared to say farewell to their favorite son, townspeople knew that the legacy he began was still in its early childhood. A loss was being mourned in this small eastern Pennsylvania town, but the mourners knew that others along the East Coast were somber as well. This solemn day in some way explains the uniqueness of this brewery in the modern globalized brewing era of today.

As you read through this history, you quickly sense the philosophy that David was able to pass all the way to today’s sixth generation of family ownership. The old German doctrine—if it is not broken do not fix it—has allowed this company to thrive in a world of homogenized marketing. Over the five chapters you constantly are reminded that this company has the ability to buck many of the trends it has seen come and go. Sure, Yuengling went from wooden to metal keg, to bottles and cans but they did not run for the spice rack or an apothecary of extracts to acquire a bastion of fickle consumers.

This brewing empire embraced advancements but shunned the fads. Very few companies the world over have been able to accomplish this feat.

Many of the technological changes that have been introduced to the brewing industry can be followed through this book. After all, Yuengling was founded almost 20 years before Louis Pasteur’s work would begin to have an impact on brewing.

I remember my first visit this brewery and I was just as amazed with the town of Pottsville as I was with the storied brewery. Not much has changed with Pottsville, PA as a whole. And in reality this book shows you how little has changed with America’s oldest brewery. Many business leaders can learn from this story. As you read through the six generations and a company that stayed the course, you will be amazed and cheer how Yuengling has earned the honor of being America’s oldest beer.

Certainly, the West Coast has been ahead of the curve in craft brewing. Anchor’s Fritz Maytag rescued steam beer, that indigenous American specialty, from oblivion. Jack McAuliffe was a modern-day Moses, pointing others to the promised land but never entering it himself. (His New Albion Brewing Co., the first microbrewery, closed in 1982.) Sierra Nevada’s Paul Camusi and Ken Grossman proved that a small specialty brewery could turn out excellent beer consistently and be a financial success.

And yet it would be presumptuous to say that the West Coast revived the tradition of craft brewing in the U.S.

We on the East Coast never lost it.

Those ’70s Beers

Let’s time-travel back to the mid-1970s. America is largely a beer wasteland, with Miller Lite cresting on the success of its “Tastes great, less filling” tagline, and Coors—a clean-tasting but otherwise undistinguished Rocky Mountains brand—acquiring an almost cult status.

But there were oases for the serious beer drinker. I found one in Williams’ Café, a long-defunct watering hole in St. Clair, PA, just outside of Pottsville. The bar served two beers from the nearby Yuengling Brewery, Lord Chesterfield Ale and Yuengling Porter. You could get them separately or blended together as a half-and-half. The heady combination of the citrusy American hops and roasted malts was a wake-up call. Beer did not have to be a homogenized commodity like pork bellies and tomato paste.

Yuengling still makes the ale and porter. They’re hybrids, fermented with a lager yeast but at higher temperatures to bring out the fruity, ale-like characteristics. Yuengling has added an amber beer (Traditional Lager) to its product line as well as a pre-blended Black-and-Tan that utilizes Yuengling Premium rather ale.

The Institute for Brewing Studies does not officially recognize Yuengling as a “craft brewery” because it uses corn grits in its beer. And yet, Yuengling’s executive vice president David Casinelli reflects, “In many ways we are a craft brewery. The way our company is run is closer to small businesses than to the large national brewers. Until recently, we had guys racking kegs with rubber mallets.” Yuengling pumped out over 1.3 million barrels in 2003—it’s now the fifth largest brewery in the country—but still relies largely on word-of-mouth to sell beer.

In northeast Pennsylvania, the Lion Brewery in Wilkes-Barre marketed its own Stegmaier Porter, sweeter than Yuengling’s, with a curious licorice-like taste. (It’s still available, reformulated as a true top-fermented ale.) The Naragansett Brewery in Cranston, RI also made a porter. In fact, the Northeast United States was one of a very few areas on the planet where you could order a glass of porter long after the style had disappeared in its native England.

C. Schmidt & Sons of Philadelphia, a sizable regional with a branch plant in Cleveland, made a Munich-style Dunkel called Prior Double Dark. In his 1978 The Great American Beer Book, a systematic ratings guide to over 550 beers then available in the U.S., James Robertson wrote, “Had there been no other ‘finds’ in all the beers sampled…, discovering Prior Double Dark would have been worth the effort.”

Schmidt’s closed in 1986, and the brewery site is now a vacant lot awaiting development. F.X. Matt, a family-owned brewery in Utica, NY, acquired the brand and recipe. “We made a draft-only version almost exclusively for McSorley’s Ale House in New York,” said company vice president Fred Matt. “We sold 400 kegs a month like clockwork.” Eventually, Heileman/Stroh underbid F.X. Matt on the account, and the production of Prior ceased. However, the brewery today makes a similar brew called Saranac Black Forest, which Matt feels has even more character.

“We used to do a whole specialty line for Utica Club; the Saranac thing is a return to our roots,” he added. During the 1970s, the brewery marketed a top-fermented cream ale and a malt liquor called Maximus Super, which, at 7.5% ABV, was the strongest lager beer then available in the U.S. “We went after a lot of the college markets; it did well for a while, then tailed off,” Matt recalled. “The nationals saw an opportunity and made a fortune going ethnic. We didn’t go that route.”

One of the East’s more obscure operations was Horlacher Brewing Co. in Allentown, PA. During the 1920s this little brewery allegedly produced bootleg beer for gangster Dutch Schultz. After Repeal, the company survived by doing private labels—scores, even hundreds of them—for supermarket chains, drug stores and liquor stores. Horlacher, however, produced a top-of-the-line, bock-style beer called Perfection, which was dry-hopped, fermented to an alcohol content of over 6% ABV and aged a remarkable (for that era) nine months.

Back in 1978, I stumbled across a musty case of the Perfection on the floor a Pennsylvania distributor. The brewery by that time was in its death throes, and the recipe had probably been compromised. But I still regret passing over the Perfection in favor of some commemorative Bicentennial cans holding ordinary beer.

D.G. Yuengling & Son in Pottsville, PA is a source of inspiration to its fellow regionals. The country’s oldest brewery was founded in 1829, when Andrew Jackson was the newly inaugurated president of the United States. During the 1990s Yuengling became a trend-setter: its Black and Tan (a mix of porter and premium lager) inspired dozens of copycat products, and its Traditional Lager (an amber beer) has added a new cachet to the word “lager.” Last year Yuengling produced 920,000 barrels, making it the eighth largest brewer in the U.S.

Yuengling has long inspired an almost fanatical following among residents of Pennsylvania’s coal regions. In 1893, a Pottsville resident named Charles Guetling—perhaps to win some barroom bet—pushed a wheelbarrow laden with a keg of Yuengling all the way to the Chicago World’s Fair. One hundred years later, Yuengling was forced to pull out of several neighboring states when local distributors hollered loud and long about beer rationing. Yuengling has since reclaimed its lost territory after purchasing the former Stroh brewery in Tampa, FL in 1999. The company was set to cut the ribbon on a modern, million-barrel-a-year plant just outside Pottsville.

After 172 years, Yuengling is still family-owned, and should remain way: the two oldest daughters of the current brewery president, Richard Yuengling, Jr., have earned their brewing diplomas from the Siebel Institute in Chicago and taken jobs at the brewery,

Survival Through Diversification

“Life was a lot easier in the 1970s,” sighs Ted Marti, president of the August Schell Brewing Co. in New Ulm, MN. “We were only doing 2-3 beers back then.” Now Schell turns out 16 different brands, including a line of all-malt specialty beers that ranges from Schmaltz’s Alt to Zommerfest (a kölsch) to Snowstorm (an ever-changing winter seasonal that most recently was an ale/mead hybrid).

The brewery was founded in 1860 and managed to survive a Sioux uprising in 1862 that razed the rest of the settlement. Asked how Schell has managed to last 140 years, Marti answers, “We’ve always had great local support. It’s something we never lost. We were adaptable. When the times changed, we changed. We also had a family that wanted to operate a brewery. I’m the fifth generation.”

Meanwhile, the Lion Brewery in Wilkes-Barre, PA—currently celebrating its 100th birthday—has survived by being a jack-of-all-trades. In 2000, the brewery operated at capacity, pumping out 400,000 barrels, according to sales manager Michael Luksic. But that figures incorporates dozens of brands of many types of liquid, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. The Lion’s latest venture is Long Island Iced Tea, a “malt-ernative beverage” flavored with black tea and measuring 5.5% abv.

The Lion has de-emphasized its traditional Stegmaier and Gibbons brands, the latter relegated to the gulag of 16-oz returnable bottles. The Brewery Hill line of craft beer gets the bulk of attention nowadays. Goya Malta, brewed for a Puerto Rican company, also helps puts bread on the table. Malta is essentially non-fermented wort, a sweet, non-alcoholic drink popular in Hispanic communities as a health tonic. The Lion also produces designer soft drinks and hard lemonades like Hooper’s Hooch.